As an Agronomy engineer, my interests are environmental and global issues and my goal is to focus my career on international sustainable development. I began this journey with one major objective: to intern in the NGO sector in an English-speaking country to understand how an organization is managed. Working at GAP Ireland proved to be the perfect opportunity for this!
During my experience as an Education Assistant Intern at GAP Ireland, I worked on two of their programmes: one on Water Conservation (Water Explorer), and another on the Sustainable Development Goals (Action on Global Citizenship). For the Action on Global Citizenship Programme, we encouraged schools to develop sustainability campaigns. Each school chose different topics, ranging from recycling, waste, human trafficking, to homelessness. As an intern, I learned how to create activities and develop resources around those topics. On the other hand, working on the Water Explorer programme helped me learn about water conservation. For this programme, I learned how to engage students in conservation by developing effective and easy ways to communicate, be that through direct contact or social media. Overall, this is exactly what I was looking for in an internship.
Within the Action on Global Citizenship programme, I developed activities and prepared workshops. This was stimulating and enabled me to learn professional skills while researching. The UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development deal with a variety of issues. Thus, for each workshop, I educated myself on different topics to find new ideas. In Water Explorer, what I enjoyed the most was facilitating workshops in schools. The students were always engaged in the activities, and it felt rewarding. Throughout both programmes, I saw the impact on students’ reflection and behaviour change.
Since interning at GAP. I feel more confident about my impact in any future organisation I might work with. I felt empowered while actively working on environmental issues and promoting sustainable lifestyles. As the internship progressed, I gained more responsibilities that allowed me to grow and learn more as time passed. The key skills I took from my time at GAP Ireland were organising and facilitating workshops for both teachers and students. Additionally, I gained skills in website management, communication, and resource development.
I really enjoyed the team-oriented structure at GAP Ireland as well. All of the team members have been so welcoming and made me feel as part of the team from the beginning. From my first day, I knew the atmosphere in the office would be friendly. Everyone became involved in teaching me new things, and that’s why my internship was so rich. Ultimately, there’s nothing left to say besides I really loved interning at GAP Ireland!
Marie GojonÂ